Contact Information

Short Biography

Dr. Feigon received her B.A. from Occidental College and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego where she studied with Dr. David Kearns. Her postdoctoral work was completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Fund Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Alex Rich. Dr. Feigon joined the UCLA faculty in 1985.

Research Interest

Nucleic acid structure and function

RNA has increasingly been found to have a role in everything from regulation of transcription and translation to synthesis of the ends of chromosomes to enzymatic reactions. In order to do these things, RNA assumes a variety of shapes and often forms specific RNA-protein complexes. DNA can also adopt a variety of conformations besides the Watson-Crick double helix, and its interactions with proteins are vital to regulation of replication, transcription, and repair. My laboratory studies the structure and function of DNA and RNA primarily using multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which provides a method for determining the three-dimensional structures of macromolecules and to study their dynamics in solution. In addition to NMR spectroscopy, we use X-ray crystallography, small angle X-ray scattering, and cryoelectron microscopy for our structural studies. Structural and dynamics information is correlated with function using a variety of biochemical and molecular biological techniques, to provide insight into how these nucleic acids and nucleic acid-protein complexes work in the cell and how mutations in RNA and DNA can lead to disease. Currently, the research in my laboratory is focused on three major topics: (1) the structure and function of telomerase, (2) biogenesis of H/ACA RNPs, and (3) riboswitch structure and dynamics.

M. Kang, R.D. Peterson, and J. Feigon: “Structural Insights into riboswitch control of the biosynthesis of queuosine, a modified nucleotide found in the anticodon of tRNA” Molecular Cell 33, 784-90 (2009) [abstract]